Bibi’s Blues

After casting his ballot yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu went to the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. Netanyahu is a secular man, but it is hard to imagine that, after running a miserable, luckless campaign, he resisted the temptation to say a quiet prayer. To paraphrase one of the oldest jokes in Judaism, he must have felt like he was talking to a wall. When all the counting is done, Netanyahu will likely remain Prime Minister, but the voters have rendered him weak. As one Israeli columnist, Bradley Burston, wrote, “‘King Bibi’ has managed to plummet to victory in a technical triumph that has every appearance of a debacle.”

It’s always been this way with Netanyahu: in 1996, he beat Shimon Peres by only a half per cent for his first term as Prime Minister; in 2009, his Likud party actually lost narrowly to Kadima, though he finally managed to be the one to form a ruling coalition. Netanyahu has never been a landslide artist.

Netanyahu’s coalition party, Likud-Beiteinu, will likely get thirty or thirty-one seats in the hundred-and-twenty-seat Knesset. In the end, the great surprise was the second-place finisher, a television celebrity and political novice named Yair Lapid, who leads a brand new—but impressively greased—centrist party called Yesh Atid (“There is a Future”). Lapid appealed largely to young, middle-class, secular voters, and he concentrated mainly on social issues like education and housing and on stripping the ultra-Orthodox of their state subsidies and military exemptions. Facebook, Twitter, and his square-jawed, salt-and-pepper-hair glamour were Lapid’s tools.

“Lapid honed in on the tastes of voters who want change as long as it’s not too drastic,” Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz, wrote after the returns were in. “These are people who love their Israeli identity and the Israel Defense Forces, but who live their lives to an American soundtrack…These are people who don’t love Arabs and aren’t interested in any ‘New Middle East’ and want peace mainly so that Israel will be accepted by the West.”

Overall, the center-left, which had seemed so deflated in spirit and imperiled in the polls, benefited from the biggest voter turnout in Israel in more than a decade. Sources in Israel told me that at least some of those voters acted out of fear of a hard-right coalition led by the increasingly reactionary currents inside Likud and the religious-nationalist party, The Jewish Home, headed by a former high-tech entrepreneur, Naftali Bennett. Bennett, who had hoped to finish third, lost ground in the last few days of the race, and stumbled to fifth. (I wrote about Bennett and his party in The New Yorker last week.)

That same broad middle class may not believe that peace with the Palestinians is an immediate possibility, but they also fear that no negotiations at all, a posture of rejection or annexation, will cause Israel to become more and more isolated in the world, even a pariah state. And such isolation would inevitably lead to increased emigration and economic disaster.

It is possible to imagine that Netanyahu will try to bring Lapid into a coalition government. After the results were in, Netanyahu said that he would “form the widest possible” coalition, but, considering the criss-crossing interests of the various top five or six parties, that will be a complicated expedition. In a phone call, Netanyahu told Lapid, “We can do great things for the State of Israel.”

Lapid has expressed interest in being education minister in a coalition, but he has also said he would not be a “fig leaf” member of an otherwise right-wing government. He says he will join a coalition only if it is pledged toward progress on the Palestinian issue. Without an eventual agreement, he said Tuesday night, “Israel’s Jewish and Zionist identity is in danger.”

Lapid’s views on the Israeli-Arab issue, however, are hardly encouraging to the traditional peace camp, much less to the Palestinians. In fact, they are close to Netanyahu’s. “Jerusalem belongs to the people of Israel and no one else,” he wrote on his Facebook page in response to a voter’s question. He added, “I don’t think that the Arabs want peace,” echoing a common refrain of frustration among Israelis since the Second Intifada a decade ago. “What I want is not a ‘new Middle East,’ but to be rid of them and put a tall fence between us and them.”

It will be interesting to see what sort of politician Lapid becomes after the spectacle and social-media chapter of campaigning. He is forty-nine, but experienced mainly in the ways of show business. Lapid resigned from Channel 2 only a year ago, and is one of the most famous people in Israel—a television star with a “Mr. Israel” image. He is bluff, cocky, handsome, and had no problem when it came to name recognition. When he was hosting a show named for him, he would ask his guests a signature question: “What is Israel to you?”

As one Haaretz reporter, Asher Schechter, wrote sarcastically last month, Lapid is a prince of Tel Aviv privilege, a “notorious wannabe,” a cigar-smoking, product-wearing TV star. He has been mocked for his modest education, his uncertain grasp of the facts—but “it’s easy to make fun of Yair Lapid.”

Lapid is the son of Yosef (Tommy) Lapid, a famous and pugnacious journalist who went on to head the Shinui Party (a party devoted to secularism and the free market), and the playwright and author Shulamit Lapid. He had learning disabilities as a child and dropped out of high school. Nevertheless, he built a career in his parents’ mold, writing for the newspapers Maariv and Yediot Ahronoth. His subjects were generally light; when he wrote politically, he kept it simple. In the nineties, he starred in a romantic comedy called “The Singing of the Siren,” in which he played the cad, and then made a career on television. He wrote a TV series called “War Room.”

Above all, he was an on-air presence, a star in every living room. “During his eight-year tenure hosting the most-watched talk show in Israel, Lapid became more than just a media personality and more than just a columnist,” Schechter wrote. “On air, he transformed into an icon.… He wanted to be a symbol, and to that end he cultivated his boyish, all-Israeli image.” One of the rewards of television stardom was a web of connections, friendships with leading bankers and entrepreneurs. He may play a middle-class hero on television and in politics, but he is a man of the Tel Aviv bubble, the coastal secular élite.

Yair Lapid’s emphasis on the secular nature of Zionism and Israel itself is inherited from his father and clearly a reaction to the rise of the religious nationalists, like Bennett, who want to re-define Zionism in the mold of settler ideology. Lapid told the Associated Press, “I don’t want a country that is defined by religion. I don’t want a country that is defined by the separation of groups and sectors.”

In the end, these election results suggest that there is greater fight in the center-left than any of the pre-election polls and journalism—my own included—suggested. Which is good news—but limited good news. Netanyahu, barring some freak of coalition infighting, will still be Prime Minister; the majority in the Knesset will still be conservative, including members of the annexationist far right; and the calculus standing in the way of a secure and decent end to occupation persists.

When I was in Israel a few weeks ago, the historian Zeev Sternhell, a staunch left-wing Zionist who survived a bombing attack by a religious radical in 2008, told me that without outside, international pressure, Netanyahu would continue to muddle along, particularly on the issue of two states for two peoples. The most crucial lever in pushing the issue forward was the American President. “Without pressure, nothing will move here. Not diplomatic niceties, but real pressure,” Sternhell said. “I can imagine that Barack Obama has better things to do, that he sees us and he is frustrated and doesn’t know where to start. But without a clear plan from the United States, we will go nowhere.”